Red Alert at the White House! How bad is the VA scandal? Bad enough to make even such as Sam Stein question liberalism. The VA scandal is getting so grievous for the Obama admin and for the liberal project at large that it has led even liberals to reconsider their most cherished ideological beliefs.

On today's Morning Joe, Sam Stein of the Huffington Post wondered "is liberalism, is progressivism, in this instance the right thing" given that the additional money the Obama admin spent on the VA has not yielded results?  View the video after the jump.

Just how poorly has the rollout of ObamaCare gone?

On MSNBC’s Morning Joe Thursday, when the perilously liberal Huffington Post reporter Sam Stein said, “The Obama administration isn’t administering the health care itself,” the perilously liberal co-host Mika Brzezinski replied, “Thank god!” (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Sam Stein, who poses as a journalist while toiling at the Huffington Post (he lost any legitimate claim to the title when he wouldn't back away when caught red-handed pretending to know something he couldn't possibly know about John McCain's vetting or lack thereof of Sarah Palin in September 2008), wrote on Thursday (HT Hot Air) that "The Obama administration is considering a fix to the president’s health care law that would expand the universe of individuals who receive tax subsidies to help buy insurance."

Of course, Stein didn't look into how much this "fix," better described as a "huge spending increase," might cost, and "somehow" forgot that any such "fix" substantially increasing tax subsidies would destroy President Obama's unqualified 2009 pledge that "I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits — either now or in the future. I will not sign it if it adds one dime to the deficit, now or in the future, period." Neither did the Associated Press's Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar in a Friday evening writeup. Philip Klein at the Washington Examiner did remember Obama's pledge. He also engaged in genuine journalism by looking at what kind of cost might be involved in the "fix" (bolds are mine):

 One way to know if a journalist is asking a softball question is when the President of the United States compliments the reporter after he or she asks it. That happened twice on Tuesday as Barack Obama talked to reporters about the government shutdown. The President called on Sam Stein of the liberal Huffington Post website. Stein dutifully wondered, "With Speaker Boehner so far unwilling to hold a vote on a clean CR, what assurances can you give to those affected by a shutdown who are concerned about an even longer impasse?"

He added, "And how worried are you personally that your preferred solution to this -- a clear CR at sequestration levels -- may do harm to the nation's economy and your second term agenda?" Finding the question appropriately fawning, Obama responded, "Sam, you're making an important point." The President looked favorably on a similar query from a New York Times journalist. [See video below. MP3 audio here.]

No, really — it has. And it’s all Congress’s fault. (Well, not all of Congress. Just Republicans, who want to “hurt Americans.”) You can tell how serious these rabbit-killing budget cuts are when the Huffington Post writes about them under the banner “Sequestration Ushers In A Dark Age For Science In America.” Ooooh, ominous.

So, what exactly is the story? The least dramatic telling of it is at Grist, which reports that the National Institutes of Health was forced by sequestration to trim $1.7 billion from its budget. Among the projects that were deep-sixed was research on human retinal degeneration at the University of Utah medical school. The project director, ophthalmology professor Robert E. Marc, is distraught not only at having the rug pulled out from under his research but at having to kill his colony of genetically modified bunnies.